PositiveThe Quarterly ConversationVisitation‘s most arresting chapter takes place outside of where the house can bear witness. After the Warsaw Ghetto has been liquidated, the twelve-year-old niece of the Jewish cloth manufacturer hides in a broom closet or crawl space in one of the tenements ... Here Erpenbeck’s writing is at its hardest and its best, perhaps in no small measure because it returns her to familiar preoccupations. However, in Visitation, Erpenbeck manages to perfect her treatment of themes previously taken up in both The Old Child and The Book of Words ... Erpenbeck reveals a workmanship in framing the reader’s view and building her narrative in such a way that is \'made to measure\'—and Susan Bernofsky’s instincts are uncommonly good in translating an author whose work is riddled with specifications ... My only reservation about Visitation is that it reads less vividly once it reaches the GDR, which is a pity when the house-as-surveillor strikes me as being an ideal conceit for the schism between private and public lives under Socialism.